How are remixes like this made?

[matthewm77]

https://soundcloud.com/gravez/sets/remixes

They all sound like the vocals are preserved from the original almost perfectly, and then other musical elements are layered over it.

Every time I try and do a remix I end up just getting frustrated and tossing it because I can never get the vocals to stand out without some other element being too loud.

I have asked this a lot but I have never gotten a good answer and never do remixes for this reason.

There's got to be some easy way to get the original track ready to remix..

Thanks!

 

[bandcoach]

in most cases the vocals are provided to the re-mixer without any other parts of the music evident - i.e. the vocals are provided as simply the vocal stems

go to Indaba Music and check out their re-mix competitions to access some premium vocal stems to work with

 

[matthewm77]

in most cases the vocals are provided to the re-mixer without any other parts of the music evident - i.e. the vocals a re provided as simply th vocal stems

go to Indaba Music and check out their re-mix competitions to access some premium vocal stems to work with

Will big labels hand these out to anyone? I notice quite a few producers doing stuff like this who I wouldn't imagine have the reach or fan base to get access to acapellas straigh from the source.

I also hear lots of talk about heavy EQ being used to isolate vocals enough to use but I can never do this

Because most of the songs are popular hip hop songs and what not. Usually the kind of stuff on Indaba is more indie focused and are artists signed to Indaba.

I could be wrong, I'm just thinking out loud.

 

[krushing]

No, they won't just happily hand 'em out...but there are a lot of remix contests which usually offer the stems to download. And of course, you always can go the heavy EQ/filtering/spectral processing way to try and isolate the vox from a complete track for your bootleggin' remix needs. It's never gonna be perfect and obviously how well it'll work depends a lot on the orchestration of the rest of the track - if it's full of other stuff, it can be hard to get rid of it.

 

[matthewm77]

No, they won't just happily hand 'em out...but there are a lot of remix contests which usually offer the stems to download. And of course, you always can go the heavy EQ/filtering/spectral processing way to try and isolate the vox from a complete track for your bootleggin' remix needs. It's never gonna be perfect and obviously how well it'll work depends a lot on the orchestration of the rest of the track - if it's full of other stuff, it can be hard to get rid of it.

Any tips on on isolating with EQ's and such?